I realized this morning that Towers Fall comes out in one month! (Cue authorial flailing.) So to kick off the countdown, I thought I’d share a little snippet from an early chapter. Enjoy!
As the spell came into being, the noise level dropped. It was no blessing. For now Shai could hear Xhea’s breath: thin and faltering gasps that became thinner and weaker by the moment.
Are they killing her? Was that what the spell had been for—Xhea’s slow but certain death? Because if so, it was a horrible way to die; even Rown’s hunters might grant a more merciful death with the serrated edge of one of their blades.
Shai reached again for the spelled tether, suddenly thinking: if she could not slice away the dark spell from the outside, perhaps she could destroy it from the inside out. She made her power flow inward, no longer shining but funneled through the tether that joined them. Into that power, too, she channeled all the feelings that churned within her, that fear and desperate hope, as if emotion were a lifeline that she might cast for Xhea to grab.
There was no pain now, no hurt—but nothing else came in its wake. Where Shai usually felt some measure of Xhea’s magic flow back into her, as if repaying the power she provided, now there was nothing, not even an echo of dark.
Still she poured all of her magic down their link—enough magic to shield a skyscraper or save a man’s life; enough magic to fuel a Tower, enough magic to set the sky alight with gold and green and blue. Enough magic, she hoped, to keep her friend here—living, breathing. With her.
She felt, too, as the tether that unspooled from her heart grew stronger, wider, that length of near-invisible energy shimmering between them like heat from flat metal.
Stay with me. Shai watched as Xhea’s breathing faltered. Please, stay with me.
At last, the dark spell writhing in Xhea grew still.
Shai stared at it, buried deep within Xhea’s chest, but could not tell where the spell ended and Xhea’s magic began. Yet that magic? She shuddered to see it. For once where power had filled Xhea, dark and steady, now there was only a small point of perfect, darkest black. A hard stone of magic caught in the chambers of her heart.
A long moment passed, then Xhea drew a shuddering breath, and another. Some of the painful tension left her limbs, and her shivering, spasming muscles relaxed to let her lie bonelessly, sprawled across the ashen pavement.
It should have been a relief—and it was, knowing that Xhea lived. Watching as her breathing steadied and slowed; watching as the blue left her lips. But she did not look well and she did not wake.
Around them, the crowd grew and grew. So many voices were raised in anger, in fear—and there was no easy outlet for those emotions. Haven’t we been through enough? Shai thought to them, seeing their twisted faces, their hands raised with fists or weapons high. But it was to the Central Spire to which those words were best directed; the golden Spire that floated, serene, oblivious, at the heart of the City above.
She did not understand what they had done to Xhea, or why. She did not understand the Spire’s command, sudden and immovable. She did not know what they wanted with this broken ground, or these burned and fallen buildings, or the ruins beyond.
No one did. And as they screamed and raged, wept and ran, Shai huddled over Xhea’s body and held her—or tried to.
For when she reached out to touch Xhea’s cheek, that golden skin gone waxen and pale, her fingers passed through as if she were barely real. Shai gasped and drew back, more shocked than when she’d been struck.
“No.” Shai reached for Xhea’s hand—wanting to touch those fingers that curled toward Xhea’s palm like a flower’s wilting petals. Wanting to hold Xhea’s hand in her own, as she had so many times before. Yet though she felt resistance, it was only like passing her fingers through sand.
“Absent gods, Xhea,” Shai whispered. “What have they done to you?”
